A-Rod: The Many Lives of Alex Rodriguez (23 page)

Alex couldn’t abide vulnerability. Not at this point in his career. Even teammates who didn’t like Alex felt sympathy for him as a player who was painfully self-conscious, who felt failure too deeply, who couldn’t stop analyzing himself on tape.

The tension of the Spotlight Moment has always prompted Alex to squeeze the bat as if he’s trying to twist the lid on a stub-born jar and to jump at pitches before his front foot is planted. “It’s very subtle, it’s not something that’s horrible or terrible, but it’s enough to throw your game off,” says Cal Ripken, Jr. “And then it has a chance to build to a pressure point that makes you think, ‘I gotta get a hit this time; I gotta get a hit this time.’ ”

The breakdown of Alex’s mechanics under stress had dogged him in the past and would haunt him during each Yankee playoff run over the next fi ve years, so it wasn’t surprising that he struggled as a new New Yorker. “You can’t put an Alex Rodriguez into a clubhouse and not think it’s going to change,” says Torre.

“The only thing I tried to get across to Alex was, Don’t try to be the guy all the time. It’s putting too much pressure on yourself.

New York is a unique place to play because with the recent history where we had the success, they’re only concerned about wins. So [I told him] don’t worry about anything else. Just go up there and do the best you can and they’ll appreciate it.”

The transition he was making had gotten the better of transient Yankees before him, including superstars such as Roger Clemens and Kevin Brown. Like them, Alex welcomed the attention and adulation but didn’t want the pressure to lead that came with it.

Alex’s teammates sensed his disconnect and left him largely on
his own. The lack of a clubhouse support group— which he never reached out to assemble— left him leaning more and more on outsiders: advisers, spiritualists and opportunists. Looking back, it is easy to identify at least two of the reasons Alex hit just .196 for the fi rst two weeks of the season: the pressure of New York, the new surroundings.

But Alex was also very likely preoccupied. There was always the steroid thing— this burden, this secret— that haunted him. He knew he had been juicing in Texas. But who else knew?

The union was supposed to protect any drug cheats by destroying the test results. In a dereliction of duty, offi cials waited too long to make that request.

On April 10, 2004, federal agents, armed with search warrants related to 10 players linked to the BALCO scandal, entered Quest Diagnostics, the lab MLB had hired to determine the results of the anonymous tests conducted in 2003.

Agents left the facility with documents and the urine samples of, among others, Barry Bonds and two players who’d recently signed with the Yankees, Jason Giambi and Gary Sheffi eld. The test results were not labeled, which meant matching them with names would be tricky— but not, it turned out, impossible, because players had signed their names to the specimen codes.

The same day Quest Diagnostics was hit, federal agents executed a search warrant for another lab, Comprehensive Drug Testing, which was responsible for cataloging the drug data. There they found a master list of doping cheats. Now the Feds had the results of the BALCO-linked players and a computer spreadsheet with the names of at least 104 players who had tested positive for steroids in 2003.

The BALCO Gang of 10 knew their 2003 test results were in the hands of the Feds the next day because the search warrants were issued to nab them, all of which prompted Sheffi eld to tell reporters, “I can’t express how I really feel . . . but life is unfair.”
The players who felt most wronged were the 104 who had not been involved with BALCO but had now been exposed as doping culprits to federal agents. Some players knew they’d tested positive.

Others never had a clue. But every user in the major leagues— anyone who thought there was even a chance they’d come up positive— was nervous. They knew the list was sealed under a court order.
But what if the names leaked out?
The players’ union went to court against the government in an effort to do what it should have done six months earlier: have the list put in the shredder.

For more than four years, the public had no idea that the feds had documented evidence that Alex Rodriguez used anabolic steroids the year he won MVP.

There was a long list of dopers in baseball and a short supply of answers as to why. Who was Alex’s enabler? There was Boras, who had a PharmD in industrial pharmacology and who would end up having a long list of clients linked to performance enhancers.

Of the 89 players listed on the Mitchell Report, nine were past or present clients of Boras. His response to the proportion has been to decry the fi ndings as “hearsay.” There were union offi cials who had obstructed steroid testing to help superstars like Alex keep on keeping on.

Alex would say in 2009 that his “cousin,” later revealed to be Yuri Sucart, shot him full of steroids twice a month for six months from 2001 to 2003, when both men were fumbling around as steroid novices. Alex was no novice. He knew exactly what he was doing as a Ranger— and then as a Yankee.

Alex must have constantly questioned his reliance on steroids: Do I really need this stuff? Can I succeed without it? The pressure he felt in Texas was now magnifi ed under the Broadway lights.

Alex couldn’t square his mind, much less his body, in the batter’s box. It was April 15, 2004, when the Yankees arrived in Boston.
That night, in the restaurant at Boston’s Ritz-Carlton, Alex and Jeter were seen together, gamely trying to ease any tension between them. The odd couple had a few more things than usual in common that day: both had been horrifi c in April, with Jeter hitting .250 and Alex .212.

The next day, when Alex hopped up the steps of the dugout for pregame warmups, he heard hecklers screaming, “Who needs ARod? . . . Who needs A-Rod?” The mischievous sound technicians of Fenway Park were accused of having lowered the volume of the pregame music so the Yankees could hear every nasty barb hurled their way by fans leaning over the fences during batting practice.

The Fenway faithful would grow hoarse booing Alex during a 6–2 Boston win. They were giddy as he went 0 for 4, and in the sixth inning, with Alex aboard on an error by Red Sox shortstop Pokey Reese, they went nuts when he was thrown out trying to steal third with Sheffi eld at the plate looking at a 3–1 count, every hitter’s dream. Cackles echoed off the Green Monster. “Every year,” Red Sox pitcher Tim Wakefi eld said, “there is [a Yankee]

over there that fans hate.”

Alex was their target this day, but Jason Giambi also got an early taste of the scorn fans would show steroid cheaters for the next few seasons. Chants of “BAL-CO! . . . BAL-CO!” accompa-nied his at-bats. “At least I’m not him,” Alex told friends, when he must have been thinking, At least they don’t know.

What was it about Alex that produced such bad karma for others? In Texas, he had been nicknamed The Cooler for icing hot franchises— and it did not escape anyone’s attention that, in 2004, Texas was 15–9 on May 1st. The Yankees, with a $190 million payroll, were shockingly average the fi rst month of the season. The
New York Post
ran a back-page caricature of Alex sitting on a dugout bench in fl ames. The headline: a-rod on the hot seat.

Yankees General Manager Brian Cashman chews his nails when he’s nervous, and in 2004, they must have bled from the
constant gnawing. What pinstripe pandemic had Alex wrought?

Jeter was fl ailing wildly in the midst of an 0-for- 32 slump. “A streak like that, you wouldn’t wish that on anyone,” Jeter told reporters when he fi nally broke through. He was asked if the presence of Rodriguez had any effect on him. Jeter replied, “He’s not in the box with me.”

But he was, in a way. Alex smothered everyone. He alienated teammates with his constant neediness. He would, just as he had in high school, ask Yankee bench players of the lowest pay scale, “How did my swing look?” after he hit a home run. “He didn’t ask you anything if he sucked that day,” one former Yankee teammate recalls, “He only wanted to hear ‘You’re great! Best ever!’ ”

He didn’t force the Yankees to hire a special clubhouse attendant for him, but he did poach one from the visitors’ clubhouse. He was allowed to have this clubbie on call, which, teammates soon realized, meant all the time. The attendant regularly played wardrobe valet, laying out Alex’s game clothes and warmups, played fetch, grabbing coffee for Alex, and dried his shower shoes for him.

Some things hadn’t changed when Alex left Texas. He remained meticulously high maintenance and kept focused on his off-fi eld image and empire-building.

At the 2004 All-Star break, Alex announced a business deal in the game’s host city, Houston. In a conference room at the Four Seasons, he wore a charcoal Armani suit and $1,000-a- pair Bor-relli shoes while discussing an exciting venture: He was opening a Mercedes-Benz dealership in the Houston area. “I’ve always been a big fan of cars,” he said, “but I’ve never been able to afford them.”

He meant as a teen, of course.

This little diversion was yet another irritant for his teammates, who wondered, Who is this guy? “It’s all part of him setting himself apart in an almost unknowing way,” says one person with close ties to Yankee players. “And this need to be accepted and this superfi cial Alex emerging over the genuine Alex . . . um, if there’s a genuine Alex left. I don’t know.”

By summer, the Yankees were on track, even though Alex was not. He was hitting an uninspiring .270 in mid-July even as New York was pulling away from Boston, up by 8½ games as the Yankees headed to Fenway on July 23. On July 24, they were in Boston, leading 3–0 in the third inning, when Alex came to the plate.

Bronson Arroyo was on the mound. The night before, Alex had knocked in the winning hit against the Red Sox and christened it “my fi rst offi cial big hit to make me a Yankee.” Arroyo stared into Alex’s eyes, glanced down, then hurled a sinker that hit Alex in the left elbow. Alex thought the beaning had been intentional and was jawing at Arroyo when catcher Jason Varitek took over. His fi rst shot was a classic put-down: “We don’t bother hitting .260 hitters,”

Varitek told Alex.

“Fuck you,” Alex said.

“Get to fi rst!” Varitek shouted.

“Fuck you,” Alex said again, then challenged Varitek, “C’mon!”

Varitek shoved his catcher’s mitt into Alex’s face and lifted him off the dirt. For an instant, Alex dangled in distress as the benches cleared in a scene that would be replayed on cable for weeks. (One interesting note: As the Yankees poured off the bench, Jeter was nowhere to be found. “I went into the dugout bathroom,” he said.

“I heard everyone running out, but I had no idea what had happened when I got back out there.”) A typical baseball fi ght ensued— a lot of yelling and circling, with few blows landed, but blood dripped from the ear of Yankee starter Tanyon Sturtze as the umpires separated the combatants and then ejected several players, including Alex and Varitek. In weeks to come, the Red Sox would point to that fi ght— the A-Rod Brawl— as the catalyst for their stunning revival in the second half of the season.
“The Varitek-Rodriguez fi ght would stand as the most important game moment of the Red Sox regular season,” wrote Dan Shaughnessy in his book
Reversing the Curse
. “It was bigger than Ortiz’s Easter homer, bigger than Mueller’s walk-off winner late in the same game. It meant more than any single home run by Manny, more than any win by Pedro, and more than any save by Foulke.

Even though the Sox did not start playing better until a few weeks later, most of the players and fans believed the season turned on the violent play— just as the classic 1984 NBA Finals tilted in favor of the Celtics after Kevin McHale’s vicious open-fl oor takedown of the fast-breaking Laker Kurt Rambis.”

This ode to A-Rod made perfect sense: the curse was on Alex.

As one member of the Yankees organization conceded, “Everything he did to try harder worked in reverse— against us.” There was indeed an odd voodoo about Alex.

“When Alex left [Texas], it was probably good for both of us,”

Rangers owner Tom Hicks says. “And I think Alex is probably, with his drive, his personality, his larger-than- life presence, better suited in a market like New York.”

The city welcomed him. The team, though, rejected him.

They did not like his haute couture fl air, his high-maintenance needs and his manicured quotes for the media. They also knew that he was a hypocrite, playing the Boy Scout by day and the Bad Boy at night.

On road trips, he hit provocative clubs other players shunned, feeling they were at risk of image damage— or the wrath of their teams— if they were seen in them.

In Texas, during an August series against the Rangers, Alex was known to have ventured to Iniquity— a swingers’ club in Dallas where a sign warns, “Be discreet and respect the privacy of others. No cameras or recording devices.” Iniquity describes itself as a
“couples-only lifestyle club” but Alex’s wife was home in Manhattan, pregnant with their fi rst child.

Alex’s peccadilloes were his own business until he started fl aunting them. He was indiscreet about his many visits to Vegas, bragging to teammates and friends about his wild nights with strippers. But he could afford such indiscretions. “You can make a lot of mistakes with $30 million year,” Jose Canseco says.

What Alex’s money couldn’t cover was the affect of his reckless behavior on his teammates.

At Yankee functions, with players’ wives and girlfriends in attendance, Alex morphed into the caricature of a hyperaggressive swinger. “He would use these corny pickup lines on a guy’s wife,”

says one former teammate. “He just wanted to know that he could, not that he would act on it. Seemed like an ego thing.”

The Yankees brass wasn’t concerned about Alex’s social skills, but they were distressed by his diminishing skills on the fi eld. In 2004, he muddled along at .286, with 36 homers, 11 fewer than he’d hit the year before. What was wrong with him? the Yankees wondered. According to two people familiar with the team’s inner workings, high-level offi cials discussed possible causes for Alex’s 2004 swoon: Was he doping or in steroid detox? Was he on something or off something? “No one knew for sure,” says a former Yankee staffer. “No one ever asked Alex directly that I know of, but there was a lot of suspicion in-house.”